What OMB can learn from Congressional caseworkers on advancing equity and support for underserved communities through government
Response to OMB RFI “Methods and Leading Practices for Advancing Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through Government”
Docket Number: OMB_FRDOC_0001-0291
Submitted by: Anne Meeker, Director of Strategic Initiatives, POPVOX Foundation, with contributions from Neesha Suarez, Director of Constituent Services, Office of Congressman Seth Moulton [MA-6]; Marven Hyppolite, Senior Caseworker, Office of Congressman Seth Moulton; Max Price, District Aide and Caseworker, Office of Congressman Seth Moulton; Diane Hill, Government Affairs, Partnership for Public Service; Marci Harris, CEO, POPVOX Foundation.
*NB: this post was excerpted in the POPVOX Foundation’s joint response to the above OMB RFI on July 6th, 2021.
Introduction
This submission offers several observations and recommendations from a perspective not usually directly addressed in Executive-Branch agency management: front-line Congressional staff who deal with constituent “casework.”
In June 2021, the POPVOX Foundation and the Partnership for Public Service invited district staffers from the office of Rep. Seth Moulton [MA-6] to discuss the questions raised by the OMB Equity RFI, and how lessons from congressional caseworkers could inform efforts to improve agency processes. Rep. Moulton’s casework team has been recognized for excellence in casework, receiving the 2020 Congressional Management Foundation Democracy Award for Constituent Services for their innovative work. The discussion touched on all areas of the RFI, with a focus on Area 1 (Burdens and Barrier Reduction) and Area 5 (Community and Stakeholder Engagement).
Background on Congressional casework:
Every Member of Congress operates at least one and often several district offices, in addition to their offices in the Capitol. Each of these offices employs several professionals who are tasked with helping constituents navigate difficulties with federal agencies, commonly referred to as ‘casework.’ The team we spoke with has between 350 and 750 ‘cases’ open at any given time; the individual caseworkers have handled thousands of constituent inquiries over the years, affording broad perspective of the burdens and barriers that individuals encounter across a range of federal services.
In a single day, a caseworker with a broad portfolio may assist a constituent with resolving conflicting letters from Social Security; tracking down documents for a passport application; expediting Medicare enrollment in a case of dire need; obtaining a status update on a tax refund when the constituent has not been able to get in touch with the IRS directly; helping a constituent contact their state and local officials for a difficult question about unemployment or Medicaid benefits; and much, much more.
“Casework” plays a vital part in Congress’s oversight responsibility, often informing legislative actions, but caseworkers also play an on-the-ground role directly assisting constituents and gathering information on local trends in federal services. From helping resolve problems to doing proactive outreach to underserved communities about underutilized benefits, Congressional district offices essentially function as a local customer service and outreach field office for the entire federal government: accessible, accountable, and effective in escalating difficult inquiries that are stalled or unresolvable through normal customer service channels. As Director of Constituent Services, Neesha Suarez, described:
““I was walking [a constituent] through ‘this is what’s going to happen, here’s what you can expect.’ I told her… ‘You’re not the only one who’s struggling. But I wish that we didn’t have to talk—I wish you didn’t have to call me, I wish that the agency could just work the way it’s supposed to. I’m happier because I get to have this communication, and we get to build this relationship and advocate for you and then strengthen our system. But we shouldn’t have to constantly be fighting with these agencies. We’re all kind of doing the same thing.””
One thing that became clear in the wide-ranging discussion, was that congressional offices — especially district offices and the insight of those staffers with casework responsibilities — are an underutilized source of insight for the improvement of federal processes. While each agency may know where bottlenecks exist and which processes could be improved within their own work, congressional caseworkers have valuable insights that cut across federal agencies and programs. Furthermore, the cases that reach congressional offices are often the “edge” or outlier cases that can be difficult for agencies to identify, and may be experienced by individuals who would be less likely than others to complete a “customer experience” survey or escalate in a way that the issue would come to the agency’s attention.
RECOMMENDATION: OMB and federal agencies should utilize congressional casework — and caseworkers — as a source of information for program improvement, especially on the topic of advancing equity and support for underserved communities, through:
Providing feedback mechanisms for congressional staff to share information about burdens or barriers that constituents are reporting or that they observe across programs, including burdens and barriers involving the interaction of multiple federal agencies
Hosting regular conversations with relevant congressional casework staff to share new information on program requirements or program changes
Treating congressional office intervention as an indication of process issues requiring assessment; why did the constituent need to contact a congressional office for assistance? What in the agency’s process was insufficient on its own?
Area 2: Barriers and Burden Reduction
How could agencies incorporate considerations of the psychological costs of qualifying or applying for Federal benefits programs into their assessments of equitable service delivery?
Several Congressional caseworkers noted in our discussion that often, agencies’ ‘modernization’ efforts shifting customer service channels to digital platforms increase the amount of burden on constituents already facing significant difficulties.
“It gets into the psychological component: is the agency questioning my service? Are they suggesting that I’m making this up? Is this my fault? Like, could I have done something better? Did I lose this document, again—when the agency already has this information? The agency that created this document should have those records. And it shouldn’t be a burden on you to carry them around with you in a file folder to prove the service that you had or the tax returns that you’ve given them.”
In these contexts, subsequent adverse interactions with agencies have cumulative psychological impacts. These cumulative impacts also affect equity when they are disproportionately concentrated in underserved communities.
To address the effects of these impacts, discussion participants suggested that federal agencies, particularly benefit-granting programs, should consider tracking the number of times individual constituents either have negative experiences (e.g. delays, requests for additional documents) or must interact with customer service (to include their Congressional office) in the course of their applications, adjudications, or recertifications, For example, each time a constituent has one of these interactions, a ‘point’ could be assigned to their file. Programs with high point counts could be targeted for improvement, geographic areas with high point counts could be priorities for opening field offices or doing additional outreach, and constituents with high lifetime point counts could be assigned a ‘guide’ or an additional level of service to ensure that they have an opportunity to share concerns and rebuild trust with that agency.
For constituents who are more comfortable interacting with existing federal feedback mechanisms for input, feedback mechanisms for customer service input are inconsistent across the Federal government, and often focus on metrics that do not accurately capture the nuance of civic experience:
“I actually think a lot can be done through feedback surveys. It feels like the service aspects of these agencies don’t really care about their customer service. You always get these, “how am I doing? Let us know how we’re doing!”, whatever it is, feedback surveys. You never see that with passport agencies; you don’t see it a lot with the IRS at all. If it does exist, if those structures do exist for feedback, they’re very much not upfront about it. A lot of our agencies think that processing time is the [only metric] of customer service, the ability to process a form and have that information. They think that’s just it. And there’s so much more to it.”
To address which adverse interactions to track, as well as expanding and enriching feedback surveys, agencies could consider convening focus groups to understand the full scope of events and interactions that represent an adverse psychological effect for constituents (the ‘burdens and barriers’ of this RFI, addressed at greater length below).
What types of overarching metrics (e.g., program uptake, over- or underpayments) might an agency use to measure a benefit program’s outcomes?
RECOMMENDATION: Agencies should index program dropoff with delays in processing and adjudication to measure whether delays lead beneficiaries to abandon the process.
Discussion participants supported tracking overpayments as a metric for measuring agency performance, especially given the damaging psychological cost of overpayment recovery on constituents.
Participants also suggested indexing program dropoff to delays in processing and adjudication: how many constituents abandon an application, or are unreachable when the application is adjudicated?
These metrics should be publicly available, and/or presented in annual reports to Congress, in part to help caseworkers plan and target their outreach.
Area 5, Stakeholder and Community Engagement
What processes should agencies have in place to engage proactively with the underserved individuals and communities that will be most affected by agency programs, policies, rules, processes, or operations?
The caseworkers we spoke with applauded OMB’s starting list of burdens and barriers as comprehensive, and were heartened by OMB’s recognition of the challenges constituents face in accessing federal services. However, although OMB rightly noted that the need for a third party advocate is often a barrier to entry, caseworkers noted that for some underserved communities, the ability to access third party help (whether for translation, assistance understanding a program, vouching for the agency’s trustworthiness, or navigating difficulties in the application process), is often vital for participation.
In particular, this type of community-based assistance can be helpful in navigating what can feel like an excess of information:
“The thing is that our constituents are trying to find the answers anyway. So rather than going to these weedy IRS websites, or SSA websites, they are going to YouTube, and going on AARP, and going on blogs, where somebody else has condensed it before them. And that person may just be a blog person, or that person may be, you know, nefarious—they may not have the best intentions.”
The caseworkers we spoke with noted that the IRS’s use of specific notice numbers in correspondence around Economic Impact Payments in the pandemic is a great model: by giving individual notices numbers that were clearly visible on constituent-facing correspondence, caseworkers and other community-based assistance services could more easily understand which documents constituents had received and develop explanatory materials that helped clarify constituents’ rights and responsibilities.
Agencies should consider developing community advisory panels of nonprofit, government, and volunteer assistance organizations to ensure that available public information is accessible and easy-to-use for their specific audiences and services, in order to improve engagement with underserved individuals and communities dependent on these third party organizations.
RECOMMENDATION: Agencies should conduct community-based outreach, including partnerships with local media and trusted local organizations
Caseworkers participating in our discussion noted that information on benefits is often difficult to find, but in some cases, media coverage of available programs helped get the word out. As Neesha recalled in helping constituents navigate little-known benefits in the pandemic,
“The first few inquiries that we got [on Emergency Broadband Benefits] were in response to a [Boston] Globe article where it was in a subsection. And then one was like, ‘Hey, I think that I heard about this thing, but I can't remember if I made it up?’ And that's exactly like every person that's reached out: ‘I'm not sure if this is a real thing, or if I'm being scammed,’ or anything like that. And we're like, ‘No, no, it's real!’”
In an era where trust in government is low, agencies should consider partnering with trusted local media to get the word out about available programs.
In the same vein, participants also lauded the Census Bureau’s strategy that prioritizes hiring people to conduct outreach from the communities the agency is trying to reach. This is a visible, tangible commitment from an agency to equitable access, and one that the caseworkers we spoke with noted was highly effective.
What tools can agency offices, including communications, civic engagement, enforcement, and policymaking offices, use to better engage or reach underserved communities?
Senior Caseworker Marven Hyppolite highlighted two effective and underutilized methods of reaching immigrant and minority communities: radio and WhatsApp groups.
“One of the things I [noticed], especially with the grant stuff, is that there are a ton of communities, especially minority communities that rely on radio, Whatsapp messages and things of that nature. And I feel like we could utilize those better to get that information out.”
Allowing constituents to sign up for WhatsApp communications from an agency, working with influencers to push trusted messaging in WhatsApp groups, and making a deliberate effort to reach out to communities through radio stations would all be helpful in reaching immigrant communities.
Neesha Suarez noted that many constituents reach congressional offices after finding information and how-tos on navigating complex processes on YouTube and to Facebook groups:
“We get a lot of constituents who will say, ‘I watched this YouTube video about how to file my taxes, like can you verify that this is true?’ Or a big thing that we had during the pandemic was all these Facebook groups coming together and crowdsourcing ideas, like ‘call your congressman or email at this time, because you’ll get a response.’ These people are willing to go out there and try to find the answers. It’s just that we don’t make it easy to get them.”
Having more available video walk-throughs and shareable content for Facebook and other social media platforms would help distribute vital information in an easily digestible format.
What practices should agencies put in place to reach underserved communities in rural areas or underserved communities that otherwise are not able to visit Washington, DC, to engage with policymakers?
RECOMMENDATION: Agencies should provide standardized, readily resharable information with Congressional offices and view them as partners in community-based outreach on program information and opportunities to comment or participate in the rulemaking process
As noted above, congressional offices are the front-line catch-all customer service of last resort. They are also an underutilized resource for identifying cumulative burdens and issues that cross agency siloes. OMB should consider proactive work to engage the House and Senate for more efficient technical processes for submission and tracking of casework from congressional offices to federal agencies and to tap into the network and knowledge of congressional office staff. Agencies could consider deliberately partnering with Congressional offices to help build on existing outreach and customer service resolution activities these offices are already carrying out. District offices are a direct portal to policymakers in the Legislative Branch, but are widely interested in anything to improve their constituents’ experience with government. Partnering with Congressional offices to help reach constituents in rural and underserved communities, push out information, or convene feedback groups could be a potentially rewarding and effective component to OMB’s emerging strategies on equity and access.
Additional Insight on the OMB Equity RFI
Additional Burdens and Barriers
Discussion participants felt that the RFI list misses some subtle barriers that are especially burdensome for underserved communities.
Form requirements (i.e. Privacy Act Release Form) that limit the ability for caretakers to engage congressional offices on the beneficiary’s behalf:
Marven Hyppolite shared this anecdote highlighting the burden presented when a family member (even one with power of attorney (“POA”)) is assisting a social security recipient who is institutionalized or otherwise unreachable in person (as was the case during the pandemic) and the “helper” is unable to complete the required privacy release form:
“Something I was just actually handling was with Social Security. I understand the reasons why they require a Privacy Act Release Form. But there are those situations, for example, where someone’s mother perhaps is in a unit that’s locked down, you can’t get hold of them, and you have an emergency. And [the child] can’t necessarily use the privacy release form, even though they have power of attorney. So that’s an example of a barrier that I was just dealing with.”
Normal customer service channels were not adequate to address this constituent’s situation, due to the speed with which their mother’s condition was deteriorating. The constituent engaged the Congressional offices as a last resort, but the agency’s inability to accept a privacy release form signed by a family member with POA prevented the ability for the congressional office to fulfill its role as a liaison between constituent and the agency.
Caseworkers report that frequent changes to the Privacy Act Release Form rules and processes act as barriers and additional burdens on beneficiaries, requiring them to complete multiple pieces of paperwork in a moment when all other customer service outlets have already failed them.
RECOMMENDATION:
Work with Congress to standardize (and, where possible, to streamline) the casework intake process and privacy form submission
Provide additional options for outlier cases in which the beneficiary is not capable or reachable to sign a Privacy Act Release Form, to allow someone with POA to sign on their behalf
Considerations of “multiple, cumulative barriers” should include the additional and exponential burden of processing delays caused by emergencies
Long wait times between application and adjudication are standard for many agencies and programs. However, as caseworker Max Price described, delays caused by emergencies often harm those already most vulnerable:
“Something that I’m thinking about in the context of discussing equity is when there are big waves like COVID, that sort of sweep through every single agency, and mean that everything is put on hold—I’m thinking of the IRS, and the huge backlog in tax refunds. The people who are going to be hurt more by this cross cuts with people who are already feeling kind of disenfranchised by these agencies, cross cuts with age, and cross cuts with technological literacy. I don’t know how this could directly be addressed, but it’s kind of a systemic flaw that when things like this happen, where they’re hard to prepare for, the people who are hurt most are often the people who are least capable of getting help themselves. It creates [a] feedback loop.”
Though delays may be temporary, the harms are not, and those harms are often concentrated in underserved communities. Neesha Suarez, suggested learning from other areas of disaster preparedness:
“It [makes] me think of how we address physical shut offs: when we lose electricity, we go to the places of highest need, we go to the hospitals, we go to take care of all that stuff. If we could just identify those criteria for individuals who are receiving benefits—like the lowest income, those with children, things like that—then it should be automatic. If this is shut off, then these contingency plans are put in place.”
Some agencies already have experience and procedures for expediting certain cases by criteria of ‘dire need,’ like the VA, Social Security, or passports. However, in a disaster, agencies are often too slow-moving to put in place rapid response dire need criteria to make sure those left most vulnerable by that disaster do not face cumulative burdens from agency processing delays.
Recommendation: Agencies should work to develop disaster preparedness and remote operations plans that triage processing to prioritize safety net programs and those who may be most vulnerable to delays in agency workflows.
Information overload, including poorly designed or difficult-to-parse resources
Neesha Suarez explained that sometimes the problem for individuals engaging with government services isn’t a lack of information, but an overload of information:
“The information overload keeps people confused, almost like the agency is the one who’s intentionally doing this. If you didn’t know any better, you would think that they were intentionally trying to confuse people or mislead people, because it’s almost like they don’t use it themselves. And I feel like this all the time.
[...]The thing is that our constituents are trying to find the answers anyway. So rather than going to these weedy IRS websites, or SSA websites, they are going to YouTube, and going on AARP, and going on blogs, where somebody else has condensed it before them. And that person may just be a blog person, or that person may be, you know, nefarious—they may not have the best intentions. So for our constituents, it’s not that they don’t want to access the information, they are willing to go on these Google searches and go down these rabbit holes. If only we didn’t make it that hard to figure it out.
”
This creates a perfect storm for a lack of trust that leads to lack of access: in being confused, constituents are likely to make mistakes, feel as if a program isn’t designed for them, or worse, be taken advantage of by a bad-faith actor promising to ‘cut through red tape’ or offer quick fix solutions. Over time, that lack of trust also undermines agency communications, leading to a pervasive sense of cynicism, particularly in underserved communities.
Psychological costs of burdens and barriers to access are cumulative, and impact a community-wide sense of civic efficacy
Participants applauded OMB’s acknowledgement of the psychological costs of interactions with government programs in this RFI, characterizing the input they often hear from constituents:
“[Interacting with an agency] can be disempowering, particularly to people who don’t have a high level of legislative literacy, legal literacy—and that can scare a lot of people away from the process. It leads to people coming to [their Member of Congress] when they feel like it’s a last resort, they have nowhere else to turn, they’re desperate. They’re feeling like they’ve failed, when oftentimes, it’s that they’ve been failed by these burdensome forms and regulations and technological barriers.”
Missing from many discussions of psychological effects of these negative experiences is the acknowledgement of their cumulative nature; they have ripple effects beyond constituents immediately affected. As Marven put it:
“We saw with the small business loans during the pandemic, the majority of [relief] went to well-to-do businesses, and a lot of minority owned businesses didn’t do very well. And in casework in general, I think we notice this thing where folks from minority communities kind of expect the government not to work, right? It’s like, ‘Oh, well, you know, unfortunately, we can’t give you this housing benefit.’ ‘Well, I didn’t get it, but did I really expect to get it?’”
A government failure to provide a timely and humane answer on a housing application becomes the background to a small business owner’s interaction when applying for relief benefits down the road, setting expectations low and leading to a cycle of mistrust, cynicism, and disengagement. In communities that are already underserved, stories of agency failures and negative interactions contribute to a collective understanding of betrayal and abandonment: that the government is not there to serve all equally.
Questions of burdens and barriers and stakeholder and community engagement are inextricable
Discussion participants drew a straight line from burdens and barriers to inadequate engagement. They suggested that agencies should proactively use data for an initial determination of who should be eligible for assistance that would then inform proactive efforts to “bring the application to them” rather than the other way around. Neesha contrasted the universal Economic Impact Payment (EIP) checks with several other COVID-19 relief measures to illustrate the point:
“Think about funeral assistance, I think this is the best example. Stimulus checks were automatic, they were sent out to you. But funeral assistance is a relatively straightforward application, it’s a lot of money, it’ll basically cover the funeral, especially up here [in northern Massachusetts]. We know how many people passed away from this, this pandemic, we know how many people should have already gotten these awards. And they’re not out there. We blast it out, and we try to do what we can, but there’s a very low overall number of applications, especially in Massachusetts. Where everybody’s having a hard time is connecting the dots: this is just a small example of this bigger issue of, ‘Here’s the money that’s out there, here are the people that need it, why can’t we connect these two?’”
The good news is that the caseworkers we spoke with were enthusiastic about the potential for lowering these barriers by tapping into existing networks and reusing approaches for outreach that have already worked well. Getting at the question of community-level trust in government, Neesha talked about the Census Bureau’s hyperlocal hiring focus:
“One of the solutions that Marven said is to hire from the community. That’s what the Census does, like they want such hyper-local hiring, they want to hire within the census tract, they want that person to work, because they want that familiar face. It’s getting these influencers out there that are already in the know, communicating with the community as trusted sources. I think, again, the Census is such a great infrastructure, like both in the way that they do the hiring from a hyperlocal perspective, but also in the way that they establish who are the ‘hard to reach’ communities. Like, ‘okay, we’re gonna have a problem with undocumented immigrants. Okay, yeah, we get that. But why are we having this problem? Why is it not just undocumented immigrants? Why is it like these people who are trusted by undocumented immigrants, and have such a bond with those groups? Again, identifying who we may have a problem with, and the psychology behind getting to those places.”
Additionally, as OMB assists agencies in prioritizing equity and outreach to underserved communities, Congressional offices should be seen as allies and sources of insight. The diversity of Congressional offices means that they are in many ways a set of laboratories for different methods of outreach and communication, and a rich potential resource for Federal agencies to learn from in developing their own outreach strategies tailored to underserved communities.
